Re: Is the "Ada mandate" being reconsidered?

[kingdon@harvey.cyclic.com (Jim Kingdon)]

>     Wouldn't quality products clearly advertising their implementation
>     do a lot to persuade people that Ada is a "real" language capable
>     of "serious" development and thus be worthy of consideration?

If by advertising you mean "publicly announcing", lots of projects
have done that.  There are success stories at:

http://lglwww.epfl.ch/Ada/Ammo/Success/success.html
http://www.sgi.com/Products/DevMagic/success/JEOL.html
http://sw-eng.falls-church.va.us/AdaIC/usage/Welcome.html

Mentioning Ada use in the documentation or startup screens of the
programs might help promote Ada, but of course that would only reach
the people who are using those programs.

Another good promotion idea is to write applets using Ada compiled to
Java bytecode, and mention the fact that they are written in Ada (see
http://sw-eng.falls-church.va.us/AdaIC/java/Welcome.html for lots more
information on that).

>     I know I have little trouble spotting the C/C++ based apps -
>     they're the ones that die with mysterious segmentation violations
>     or memory access errors because of abused pointers or array
>     accesses that aren't range limited.

Uh, be careful of overhyping Ada.  While there are obvious benefits to
a "nonmysterious" CONSTRAINT_ERROR over a mysterious segmentation
violation, neither one is the kind of thing which users really want to
see.